Okay, I also do use AI, I use it in programming and in my writing.
And you know what, I feel shy saying that out loud, and this is true to the extent when I have a chatbot tab opened on my computer and someone else comes in without notification, immediately I will close it so as he won’t see that I’m using AI.
Because people will think I’m dumb. And at the same time, I can’t show off the things I have done by using AI, as it will make me look like I have cheated in an exam and managed to get away with it.
For me this is so deep, I even feel ashamed of myself.
But wait, the more I have been thinking about this the more I have realized there is something else behind. I have come to see there are two ways we are using to view AI, and maybe with one of them we can all kill this “unfair” shame we have been dealing with:
1. “The Dumb” vs “The smart one”
There are few smart people who even before the era of ChatGPT, they were shining on the top and for sure we did bow to them for a very long time. Of course, we also admired them and wanted to be like them.
Look, whenever I was stuck on something there was this guy the smartest of all I would call and ask him for help and depending on the extent of my problem I would even sit down on mud if he asked me to, just for him to fix my problem.
But in early 2023 ChatGPT destroyed this monopoly, now I don’t need to beg, I just need a prompt to get what I need.
But this destruction had its side effects: The one who was “dumb” deeply always had envy towards the smart one, and now after getting a tool which can make him literally “smart” he has started to brag too (consider it as a payback time)
On the other hand the smart one who lived his whole life with glory (as we worshiped him), has turned angry. With more ego he becomes more irritated seeing even the “dumbest” people are now pretending to be smart. He has jealous towards the tool (ChatGPT) as it has made people who once respected him, now they just ignore him. So as a result, he started to attack the tool calling it stupid but deep down he only wants to discourage people from using it so as they can come back to bow to him again.
There are also other set of people who approach AI as “entrepreneurs”. And with entrepreneurs I literally mean all people who generally want to accomplish great things.
But who are entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurs always wants to win the market and make more profit in their ventures. If something can give an entrepreneur a cheap raw material at the same quality, he will surely go for it. If something doesn’t seem profitable in the market they will change course. They always do anything, taking any opportunity coming their way to even make more profit.
If you laugh at them when they are collecting scrap metals in the street, ooh boy, just continue laughing at them but what you might not know they might be making more money.
Entrepreneurs always know what they are doing, they know the risks and downtown effect of what they are trying to do, but the key thing which make them stand out the most is their courage to act on any opportunity strategically.
The people with entrepreneurship spirit, are the ones who see things objectively: that what can AI give me now, so as I can move faster, I can operate cheaply, I can get more profit instead of more loses.
Okay, now let’s look at AI objectively as real entrepreneurs
What we shouldn’t forget is that AI is a machine, like any other machines they just simplify work, after all this was predictable from the start, if you ask any programmer or someone obsessed with technology, they always want ways to make things easier with tech even if what they already have is a lot. By this it’s clear AI was coming.
We moved from typewriters to MS words, manual bells to electronic bells, even in programming itself, we started with 0 and 1, but some guy was tired of it and now we have countless programming languages.
AI was definitely coming too: moving from having knowledge and thinking ability in brains to computers. It’s just technology couldn’t catch up fast back then, but the goals had always been the same: to have your legs crossed while not doing the mundane tasks and instead outsourcing them to a machine to do it for you.
AI is a tool, and so it should be treated like that and be used very well (to simplify work).
As entrepreneurs we will say: it should be used well with the aim of making more profit instead of driving more loses to you. If you use it in a way which bring loses to you now or even in the future, then you are not a real entrepreneur.
Again, you need to look objectively what can you gain from this tool and what can you lose depending on the way you are using it.
How can AI elevate your life and how can it destroy it.
I think this is the best way of viewing AI instead of the egocentric view full of jealousy and envy, even if you consider yourself “smart” or have been labelled “dumb”.
Now as an entrepreneur, what loses can AI cause to you:
—YOUR OWN KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS DATABASE
One of the fascinating things about our brain is that it’s always painful to learn something new, there is more discomfort associated with doing that. As a result, most of the time we have these tendencies of running away from anything with traces of discomfort associated with learning. It requires one to summon oneself and start to see this pain as a normal thing to get the most from learning.
But now we have AI, with enormous amount of knowledge you might use at any time, with more skills to do stuff for you without the need to know them. That’s great because it relieves us from learning stuff when pain or time loses from the process is not feasible for the moment.
But here is the thing in some cases of your life you will need to remember facts or even insights or have certain skills so as to continue with the next course of action. If you have nothing in your brain database, then that becomes a problem.
Too much outsourcing of knowledge and skills somewhere else in a manner, which is not strategically will leave you dependant to them and make you not able to act on your own in situations where you can’t get access to these knowledge and skills tools.
This can even be detrimental to you causing opportunities to slip between your fingers or even worth disappoint people as you couldn’t recall or do something when they depended on you.
As an entrepreneur forcing yourself to learn crucial stuff and skills so as you can have them readily available in your brain at any time will become a strategic move, and this is for the sake of your future in situations where you will not have access to AI.
—CRITICAL THINKING FOR PROBLEMS SOLVING
The basis of critical thinking is that you have a problem, and you are required to think real deep to come up with a solution or the next move.
As we are thinking we usually go through this question: Among the things I know, which one can I use even in combination with others so as I can use them as a solution to the challenge I’m facing right now.
“What you know” + “choosing one of them / connecting dots” ⇒ “a solution”
Deep down this requires you to have a deeper understanding of the things you know. If you know it deep you will then know that bottom corner of it can fit to the top hole of that other thing you know and then boom! you have your solution.
But at the same time this deeper understanding is amplified if you have used that knowledge many times, this way you can see the solution clearly, because you are familiar with the patterns.
Critical thinking then just becomes a game of looking at what you know and then look for ways how one of them can be applied in a particular way to solve your problem, and the more you do this game the more you get good at it, and the reverse happens too, if you don’t do it.
The limiting factors in critical thinking are the amount of knowledge you possess and deep understanding of them, and your ability to connect dots between them.
Now we have plenty of knowledge from AI and it can even quickly connect dots to see what might become the best solution to your problem.
But still the same question comes again, do you still have your own critical thinking when you are forced not to rely on AI or when AI can't give you the best critical thoughts?
All these are still based on: As an entrepreneur you need to be able to think critically when you are on conditions where you will not be able to access AI, and at that moment it might be your opportunity to make more profit than others. So, developing the ability to think critically on your own is very essential in your ventures
What can AI give you as an entrepreneur
There are things before took days to complete now with AI we have started to talk in minutes scale. Imagine how many products can be shipped with this, imagine how much time you can save and use it to work on other crucial stuff.
Just with speed it can make you be far away from your competitors.
If you want to win in entrepreneurship, speed should be your ally, and AI has given us that.
Just a tool condensed with PhD level knowledge, skills to do things as masters. But before you had to pay someone, you had to invest more time to get knowledge and skills commodities for your ventures. Now the price of that has decreased disruptively.
Now it’s clear, it has become cheap to do things, what’s remain is your courage to try out things.
How to use AI (as an entrepreneur)
As an entrepreneur with the aim of maximizing profit, I think these are the major ways which we can use AI for more advancements in our ventures:
There are a lot of things we don’t know, but luckily enough we have managed to get a tutor just in our pockets. Anytime there is something you don’t know you can use AI to get a better specialized teaching, and apply the knowledge and skills obtained to generate more profit.
Again, as an entrepreneur AI is a tool, I can’t waste my time and energy using hoes to farm a small area while there are tractors which can do more than that with more assurance of more profit.
As a rule, whenever AI can do a job efficiently which was used to be done manually, I’ll let it do it.
Remember speed and operation costs are two essential parameters which we always need to optimize if you need to be successful in this business.
If you won’t use it, smart entrepreneurs will do.
Now I know, there will be a following up question here:
If AI can do all the jobs which I can do, what will I do?
The answer is simple though it’s too clouded with fear of being jobless:
You will do what AI cannot do.
And this is not something new, it has always been this way with technology:
Once a certain task is automated it makes us realize there are new or other tasks remains mundane and we struggle with a lot, so the cycle begins again trying to automate that too.
There are a lot of things AI cannot do now, your task as an entrepreneur is automating those which can be done with AI and focus on the rest as from those it’s where your competitive advantage will be.
Now this one is for me as an aspiring technologist: In tech the real opportunity I see is on improving AI to be even better, making better tools which uses AI, there are many hard-core parts of software engineering which currently AI can’t do, so it’s not “doomsday” for software engineers as how it’s proclaimed out there.
This automation role with AI opens up another role: A manager of AI tools
You will need to be the one who, have a vision on what you want to accomplish, instructs AI tools to automate tasks for you, assess the outputs of AI if they are as intended and implement the outputs of AI.
This is the new venture, which brings the reason why you should know these things early, because it's where the world is going right now.
3. Cross checker of your work
AI has all the knowledge, all the best practices and more, we can use it to check on what we have been working on, for critics and suggestions for improvement. With this the work you are doing gets even more advanced.
4. As a Templates builder
Now if AI can do most of the parts quickly and efficiently, there is no need to use more time in those.
The right way I see in which we can take advantage of this:
We can let AI build quickly the layouts of what we are trying to do up to the point where it has no skills to do well, and then our task becomes doing few changes on parts we don’t want and add the parts AI can’t do (as we have already got the template).
With templates we become the extender of where AI ends with its power, with that we leave more space for us to focus on the most crucial parts, and we will be able to move faster.
And yes, though AI is great, currently it’s not that great, but it’ll keep getting great with time, so make sure to cross check AI outputs to avoid having your work destroyed.
GOING MANUAL DELIBERATELY WITHOUT AI
I don’t know your house, I don’t know which room have a titled floor, due to fault designs.
Because I never lived there, even if you give me its map or pictures and videos until I get familiar with it well, it won’t be the same compared to when I have lived there in a year.
That’s the same experience you’ll have when you have built things with your own hands for many years. The next time someone do it for you, you’ll immediately be able to tell what was made good and what was bad. No one can lie to you on this. If you had never built something yourself, you won’t have the same experience as this even if you read it or had countless tutorials on it.
There is something special in building or living an experience, I don’t see a compatible substitute for this. Being physically present in these it’s like it's giving you a different set of eyes which makes you see clearly every pattern and every details. These kinds of eyes are not made with just going theoretical with stuff, or making someone else do it for you without you knowing anything.
This is why managers lose touch of what they are managing if they never touch it multiple times, operators and supervisors are always the best people to trust on this.
The same effect appears when you use AI to do things for you. If you automate things you don’t know there is less valued and more polished output generated compared to when you use it to automate things you know.
This is the same as when you hire someone to do cleaning at your house; you’ll surely know if the person has really done a great job or not.
Don’t use AI to automate things you don’t know how to do yourself. This is dangerous especially in situations where you are required to be the core part of showing or using what AI has generated for you. If there was an intended observations and you couldn’t know about it, that won’t be good in your favour for sure.
The only time when you can use AI without the need of knowing what it does it’s when it has become “serveless”, that it doesn’t cost or jeopardize you anything for not knowing the output generated. This is only possible when there is 100% assurance of the output of AI that it's always correct (but for now we are not there yet)
—Serverlss is the concept in wed development where you don’t need to set up your own server or even knowing how to maintain it, you just pay and then everything is done for you, and you not knowing anything at all on how it operates it doesn’t affect you.
Why you should still keep on doing things manually on the side and at the same time automating fully with AI?
1. With time you’ll loose touch with the things you are automating. Doing things manually is a way to strengthen and reboosting your skills set.
Even if you already have expertize, in what AI is automating for you, I still suggest we should have a ritual of doing things manually too.
If you don’t use it you lose it
2. You become a better AI manager by doing things manually.
Avoiding losing your skills is not enough, going manual also makes you understand better what you are building and as a result improves your automations as it makes you instruct AI well to give you better results, it also makes you detect quickly if AI didn't do what you instructed or if it has done very well this time.
You won't get all these if you are instructing AI or even a person to do something you don’t know.
When you are an AI tools manager your roles becomes focused on setting plans and visions, instructing AI what to do, inspecting outputs of AI and implement them. If you don’t know what you are managing that’s bad, and the only way to make yourself better on this and in leadership in general is to try to do things yourself sometimes so as to strengthen your taste on what’s good and bad.
I'm addition It gives you the power and “confidence” to intervene AI generated outputs on things which do not add up. If you have lost your touch this will be hard for you, as you will turn into a “accept” and “please fix it” guy.
3. Finally if you have covered well number 1 and 2, then by using AI to automate your activities it will enable you to build with high speed and hence beat most of your competitors and get more profit as an entrepreneur :)
A NOTE TO COLLEGE STUDENTS
—Practice intensively doing things manually. In college, this is the phase where you are supposed to be building your ability to stand up confidently on your own infront of others, and this mostly mean you have your skills and knowledge readily available anytime without depending on AI.
If you do more outsourcing to AI you will lose your confidence, and you know this more than anyone.
—Use intensively AI in your projects but as an entrepreneur.
If you want to risefromCollege, one thing which you need to hold closely is latest technologies. This is the most prominent way to help you build your competitive advantage in everything you are doing.
Most people are slow in this, and if you manage to master and exploit more on this, it's when doors of success starts to open to you as an entrepreneur.
AI is one of those new technologies which you should take action on.
#moreExposure #buildUpSkills #TryOutThings
